BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Farewell blues Farewell blues By Giles Wilson BBC News Magazine For 60 years, the cartoons of Wally Fawkes have been familiar parts of newspapers and magazines. Now failing eyesight has forced him to put down his pen. The show, however, will go on... In a society increasingly categorised by lists of the Top 10 Greatests, perhaps one day everyone might be the best in the world at something. It will always, however, take something special to be Number One in two quite separate categories. Depending who you talk to, Wally Fawkes is either Britain's greatest living cartoonist or one of its greatest living jazzmen. What you do visually, you do aurally Wally Fawkes, on the similarity between cartoons and clarinets Drawing under his pen-name, Trog, Fawkes's cartoons have, until a few weeks ago, appeared in newspapers and magazines without a break for the past 60 years. His distinctive style is one of the most widely admired and is recognisable by millions of readers - even many not aware of Trog by name. But now, aged 81, Fawkes has had to give up drawing.

Declining eyesight has meant that, while he can still see peripheral trees and grass when walking on Parliament Hill near his home, the fine detail of drawings - and particularly his trademark cross-hatching - completely eludes him. "I was sad to give up... yes," he says. "Of course I was. But it was becoming harder and harder to draw, and to be honest, there was a degree of relief in stopping. I will miss the process of coming up with ideas, though. The buzz is what I loved - putting two wires together and getting light! 'Ahh! there's the idea, there it is'. " Some of Trog's memorable work, 1973-2003 In pictures There was no shortage of pressure to come up with ideas. Over the years, Trog had slots to fill in publications too numerous to list. It wasn't a one-size-fits-all solution he found either. From the small "pocket" cartoons typically found on newspapers' front pages, through the pointed political comments next to the opinion columns, to masterful full-page colour portraits. And then there was the cartoon strip Flook, perhaps what Trog will be best remembered for.

Flook began life as a children's strip in 1949, but over the years, and with the help of Humphrey Lyttleton, George Melly, Barry Norman, Barry Took and Keith Waterhouse, among others, it became a social and political satire very much for the adults. Post-war record Despite its following - which included Baroness Thatcher who said it was "quite the best commentary of the politics of the day" - the Daily Mail decided in 1984 it no longer wanted Flook. The only warning its readers got was a strip in which a blue plaque appeared on the wall: "Flook lived here 1949-1984." Robert Maxwell saved the strip for the Mirror at his wife's behest, but only briefly, and with that, a unique record of post-War Britain ended. The best way of jumping on a target is to appear to be walking past it Trog - to George Melly But Trog's political commentary went on for another 20 years.

The skill, he says, was finding a truth about a person and communicating that in a drawing: "What you want is a picture, no words at all, maximum contrast, BANG!" Dr Nick Hiley, of the Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricatures at the University of Kent, says that Fawkes's influence is greater than people might imagine - not least that he was the first cartoonist to include royalty, even the Queen, as cartoon figures. Though Fawkes is not one to be rude - always wanting to find more to say about a target than pointing out large ears or a big nose - neither is he deferential. Fawkes's studio is now being cleared out Born in Vancouver, he came to the UK aged seven. He made himself learn to speak Cockney so as not to stand out. But he still felt patronised by those he describes as having "rude aristocratic accents - so condescending to someone from the New World". "I've always had a problem of trying to demolish the superior. I remember when Lady Rothermere [wife of the Mail's owner] was introduced to me, the person who drew Flook, and she said: 'Oh how marvellous!

How is your furry little curly thing?' Without thinking, I said: 'Fine thanks. How's yours?' I've never been able to stop doing things like that." For a satirist, this is probably not a bad skill to have. Harmony His reaction against the Establishment should have included people like Humphrey Lyttleton, he says: "Etonian, son of an Eton house-master, an officer in the Guards". And yet through their love for jazz - Fawkes on clarinet and Lyttleton on trumpet - and particularly in the 50s when jazz was at its most popular, they both became well-known figures. It is an irony that Lyttleton's cult following, as the host of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, owes nothing to his jazz. TROG'S PUBLICATIONS Punch - colour portraits Sunday Telegraph - 'pocket', politics But the music transcended the differences between them, says Fawkes. "We were equal in every respect because of the music. It doesn't matter who you are - if you can play, you're in." And Fawkes can certainly play.

If jazz had not given way to rock and roll, figures like Fawkes and Lyttleton might have become the megastars. As it turned out, both jazz and cartooning remained what he calls "minority pursuits". Jazz fans knew Fawkes as the cartoonist; cartoon fans knew him as the jazzman. It would be wrong to think of the two as entirely separate disciplines, though. "If I'm playing Lady Be Good," he says, "I know the chord sequence and that's what you're improvising on. "And if I'm drawing somebody, I know the structure of their head and I improvise on that. What you do visually you do aurally. You keep the identity there, so that however far out you go, you're always playing Lady be Good. It can be traced back." There is also a more practical parallel. "The clarinet reed and the nib of a pen are very closely related," he says. "Very often it takes a long time to find a good one. In both cases, you're looking for one of just the right strength.

And sometimes, just when you've found a good reed or nib, you break it somehow." Improvisation But now, unable even to see clearly where he is signing his name, it is time for Fawkes to move on. His studio of 35 years, where his pens and brushes jostle alongside his clarinets, is being cleared out as he and his wife downsize. 'The reed and the nib are closely related' And while the drawing has stopped, the music will go on because mercifully, improvised jazz is one form of music not requiring good eyesight. Fawkes plays every Tuesday night in the corner of the White Hart pub on Drury Lane with some old chums. Some of the pub audience evidently know the significance of what they are hearing. "I was playing the other night, when a middle-aged chap came in and produced a photograph of the old Lyttleton band from 1949 or 50. I recognised them all. And there was a young girl sitting with the band, it was obviously between numbers because we were all sipping and smoking. And I said 'God I remember her! She was a right raver!'.

"This chap just looked at me and said: 'That's my mother...'" For Fawkes himself, though, it's not about past glories. It's just the joy of playing which motivates him, as he refers to the blackboard outside the pub: "Ahh just what I've always wanted - my name up in chalk." Looking Back at Flook: An Interview with Wally Fawkes | The Comics Journal Looking Back at Flook: An Interview with Wally Fawkes BY Adam Smith Sep 11, 2013 Flook, which appeared in British newspapers for over 40 years, may be the greatest unlauded daily strip of the post war age, and is certainly among the most criminally uncollected. The disarming appearance of its title character, somewhere between a piglet and a mole, conceals a world of keenly observed and hilarious high satire that stands complete comparison with acknowledged greats of the field such as Pogo and L’il Abner.

Uniquely the strip offers a mainlined, as-it-happens comic strip almanac of British culture, politics and society during that enduringly fascinating epoch of modern history that takes in Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, The Beatles and the coming of Margaret Thatcher. It achieved this thanks to a succession of savvy script-writers and the brilliant work of its sole artist and caretaker Trog, the penname of Wally Fawkes, one of British cartooning’s best-kept secrets. A complete reprint (or a representative collection at the very least) would be an eye-opening read for anybody with an appreciation for the newspaper strip format in its zenith, or who simply fancies a first class tour around the bustling essence of mid to late twentieth century London. Flook originated in 1949 after the proprietor of the UK’s Daily Mail, Lord Rothemere, took approving note of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby and expressed a desire for a similar series to run in his paper.

Mail journalist Douglas Mount duly devised the story of a young boy named Rufus, whose simple wish for a pet is thwarted until the day that Flook, a prehistoric and chameleonic “small furry creature” literally falls out of the child’s dream. The 24-year old Fawkes was assigned as artist, and drew these formative chapters with a dark expressive line and parochial detail more associated with fine art illustration than strip cartoons. Soon Rufus and his new best friend were embarking on a series of exploits that found boy and creature at turns encountering ghosts in The Tower of London and travelling to a South Sea island on the trail of a millionaires long lost daughter, Flook’s special power to change into anything often playing a key role in proceedings. However, within a few years (and a change or two of scriptwriters), the pair’s daily adventures had started to stray from such strictly storybook escapades into decidedly more satirical terrain. As the strip’s unbroken continuity progressed, Flook gradually outgrew his animalistic attributes (and for the most part, his shape-shifting ability), to make his name and his home in London as a somewhat unlikely figure of considerable cultural and political influence.

At once a pro-actively progressive liberal and a bon viveur with paws in every level of society, he always retained enough of the primordial remove of his origins to keep one step ahead of his peers and foes. In contrast, Rufus remained a child; while still Flook’s best friend and enduring foil, he seemed to become ever more innocent and epicene as Flook’s world grew layered with the intrigues and vices of London in the raw. Indeed, Flook presents perhaps the most acutely observed and complete London ever seen in comics history: over the years the strip accrued a sizable supporting cast; including robust archetypes of every strata of British society, from the rough cut crook Bodger to the multi-purpose establishment man Sir Montague Ffolly, taking in social climber Scoop and his wife Prudence, unscrupulous bar-propping journalist George Jabb, and many more, to say nothing of the numerous parodies of contemporary celebrities and politicians. Each really comes alive in the dialogue, which is infused with a keen ear for the appropriate London vernacular and spot-on cultural reference points.

This social veracity was reflected in the strip’s appearance; by the early ’60s Fawkes’ art had achieved the perfect mean between stylisation and pin-sharp observation, at once modishly iconographic and richly illustrative. His striking use of real life London locations, filmic compositions, and carefully constructed likenesses lend every three or four panel strip a perfect cartoon realism that is both evocative of the moment and immediate to the modern reader. With this singular cultural sweep, and the combined guile and lack thereof of its two leads, Flook was well-primed to satirize every trend and concern of the day, throwing up some truly inspired storylines. Sometimes the strips’s blend of the cultivated and contemporary tended merely towards the whimsically ingenious – for instance, when threatened by the devilry of the modern day vacuum cleaner riding witch Lucretia, Flook has the idea of fashioning a mobile magic circle from a hula hoop.

In another strip Alice Liddell falls through the looking glass into 1966, and has to re-invent herself as a masked superheroine to prevent a bombastic point-missing movie of her adventures making it to the big screen (if only she’d fallen into 2010…) Other moments simply knock the reader for six with their joyful anarchy, like the strikingly fourth –wall breaking strip of 1955 where Flook and his rival of that month Mr Sprott are shown playing cards while the Daily Mail is on strike, waiting for their cue to resume their roles.

But the series is at its most affecting when it takes on the allegorical mantle of a great modern fable, such as when Flook moves to a new town, only to encounter racial prejudice towards his small and furry kind, and it takes the populace turning overnight en masse into Flooks for them to change their mind and… start persecuting Rufus instead; or when the duo return to the Stone age and see the cold war stalemate paralled in the impasse of two groups of cavemen; or the moment in a 1961 sequence which sees the senior management behind the purposeless but pervasive mass consumer product “Instant Sludge” revealed, to Flook’s horror, to be literally faceless. Flook’s distinct invention and cultural depth was thanks in no small measure to the series of scriptwriters who had succeeded Mount; most prominently many of the scenarios outlined above were the work of the gregarious jazz vocalist, pataphysician and surrealist George Melly, who lent the mature Flook much of his own character, interests and favoured drinking establishments.

But the roll call also includes the author of Whiskey Galore, Sir Compton Mackenzie, film critic and television personality Barry Norman, Marty Feldman’s writing partner Barry Took, Jazz bandleader Humphrey Lyttleton and Billy Liar author Keith Waterhouse. Of the endeavours of each of these men entire volumes could be devoted (and in most cases have been). But always providing the visual component and steering the strip over its 40-plus years was Wally Fawkes. Born in Vancouver in 1924 but a resident in the UK since 1931, Fawkes’ talent for illustration was apparent from an early age, and after his work was discovered by the Daily Mail’s political cartoonist of the day, Leslie Illingworth, he commenced his professional career on 24th June 1945— his 21st birthday— initially drawing editorial column breakers before commencing work on Flook.

He balanced the first decade or so of his cartooning career with an equal commitment to playing clarinet with several popular New Orleans-inspired jazz groups of the period (including one led by Humphrey Lyttleton), being one of the instigators of what would become known as the British Trad Jazz movement. Fawkes always noted that “the cartoonists know me as the one who plays the clarinet. The jazz people say I’m the one who does the cartoons.” However from the late 1950s onwards, Fawkes focused his professional interests firmly on drawing, and expanded beyond Flook and the Mail into creating political cartoons for more left-of-centre UK papers such as The Spectator, The New Statesman and The Observer, as well satirical magazines like Punch and Private Eye. Renowned by the likes of Raymond Briggs amongst others as one of the UK’s finest caricaturists, his solid, note-perfect likenesses and subtly profound commentaries stand in controlled contrast to the more conspicuously rambunctious work of near contemporaries such as Scarfe and Steadman, and constitute a remarkable body of work in their own right.

After exactly 60 years, Fawkes retired from cartooning in 2005, and at 89 now resides in retirement in the Camden borough of London. He was recently gracious enough to grant me a telephone interview about Flook and his career. — Adam Smith Over the years, Flook gradually developed from being a children’s strip to a more adult-orientated satirical strip. How did that come about? Going from a children’s strip, that happened quite early on… Douglas Mount was the first one who had the idea of the little boy and the little animal who fell out of his dream, which was the starting point; but I wanted it to be more social comment, a bit more reflective of what was going on. So that’s always what you wanted?

Yeah, and after Douglas Mount we got Bob Raymond; he was Australian, he was a very good journalist working for Picture Post, so he was well up with what was going on; you know, world politics, and we did a story in ’53… that was the big coronation year, and Everest, so we did the Abominable Snowmen, but we made the snowmen actual snowmen, and the fat ones lived above the snowline, and the thin ones lived just beneath the snowline, and Flook had to sort of make it more even; so he told the thin ones to insult the fat ones, and they all got angry and threw snowballs at the thin ones. They lost weight and the thin ones gained weight; that was pure communism! But the Daily Mail didn’t seem to notice the implications. That was the first political one. And did you carry on in that vein for then on? Yeah; well you know, it wasn’t always as loaded as that… and then, the Daily Mail wanted to increase their sales in Scotland, because there was a noticeable shortage of Daily Mail readers north of the border, so we got Compton Mackenzie in, and he did a re-write of Whiskey Galore.

He must’ve been quite old when he worked on the strip. Well he seemed old… how did he still get about? He was 70. That seemed so old then, but now, I look back on 70 as… well, not the first flush of youth, but certainly, the prime of middle age! You know, you’re approaching your peak at 70. Did you meet a lot to work or was it done through letters? No, I’d meet Compton Mackenzie, he’d come to the house; and then, he invited me down to his place in the country…but the amount of whiskey we got through! It’s not very conducive to drawing, is it? Woah, I was shattered the next day! But it was all in his stride. And then Humph [Humphrey Lyttleton] came, because I was standing next to him on the bandstage… he was the nearest person!

But that was good, we got back to Flook going back to caveman days, and they invented the club, but with a nail through it, which was the equivalent of the atomic bomb… so Flook tried to make them outlaw it, or it would be the end of civilisation as they didn’t know it! Did you find it a challenge to draw a week’s worth of Flook strips while regularly playing jazz gigs? Keeping the playing and the drawing together, that really became more difficult. There was a time in ’54 when I had an offer to go to Geneva to play with Sidney Bechet with a Swiss band, and to produce a stockpile, because that was about three or four weeks, everybody was filling in–I was doing the outlines, and everybody was filling in, like Neb, [Ronald Niebour]. They all got together and supplied me with a stockpile of strips so I could go away to Geneva and play with Bechet. Then from about ‘55, our band became more and more successful, the touring increased, there were continental tours, and I was heading towards a nervous breakdown, the strain of it all was just too much, and I knew what I had to do.

I knew I wouldn’t make any money out of playing; unless you’re a bandleader, you just don’t. And to keep the music, which I loved, safely on one side and really concentrate on the drawing. Which was a very good decision. So I left Humph in ’56. The sleeve of The Troglodytes’ 1960 EP “Flook Digs Jazz” Have you toured since then? For a while I had a band called the Troglodytes. We did the occasional tour up north; it wasn’t really touring, just the occasional weekend, like a Saturday night gig. The Trad Jazz of Chris Barber was sweeping, and you had to have banjo. We got a bit tired of that noise, and we were trying to move away from that painting-by-numbers school of music. Gradually it came back to the pub, and I’ve spent the rest of the time playing in pubs. The occasional concert, but now I’m not really playing at all–I decided to quit while I was still at the bottom! Then we get to George Melly, who took over from Humphrey Lyttleton… The different writers brought different things to it. Well, Flook became George.

Fawkes portrait of Melly, from the cover of Melly’s 1965 autobiography. I thought that. Did you? Yes, very much… the way he acts in those strips, he’s a kind of social butterfly, appearing on tv… And going to all George’s clubs… you know, Muriels on Dean Street, and the French Pub, Wheeler’s restaurant; all of George’s circle of watering holes. Did you see him a lot socially during that period? Oh yeah, he was my favourite character in fiction! Because we were so different. Whereas I found it difficult laughing out loud, George could smile out loud! A tremendous outgoing personality. That is quite often considered to be the peak of the strip, the George Melly years. Yeah that was when it created most attention I think.’56 he started, and by the early ’60s, there’s the Profumo affair… “The Clip-On Bowtie Affair”…that was the Flook version – Oh yeah, that’s the one. From “The Clip-On Bowtie Affair” (1963) He did it right through to ’71. So he did the whole of the ’60s. Yeah.

Particularly with those strips, you were able to tackle such adult themes, but it was still a children’s strip, it’s very cleverly done, it’s like a fairytale. Yeah, I think we wanted to amuse the parent as well as the offspring. There’s the strip about Kenneth Tynan, [Critic notorious for being the first person to use the F-word on British television] where they ban “Food” as a 4-letter word… do you remember that? Flook becomes a food critic on TV, but he sees all his co-hosts being gluttonous, and they turn into pigs before his eyes, so he decides to have a moral crusade against food, and the 4-letter word “food” is banned. Then Kenneth Tynan is on TV, and he uses the 4-letter word “Food” and creates an outrage… I thought it was very clever the way children could read that, and it was also a very adult satire. Well, that was tremendous. George was very sharp.

Another quality I love about Flook is how the reader can build up a vivid picture of the times and places featured when reading the strips, especially London in the ’50s and ’60s… I was wondering if this kind of reality was particularly important to you, and how much real life research you would do for the stories. You’re talking about location, and I did, I got a huge amount of pleasure , whenever they cropped up, and suggested a real place, I’d get on my bike and draw it. Y’know, of little churches… there’s one little church just outside St. Pancras station, a very pretty little church, and I remember drawing that , to give it interest, so people could say “Hey! That’s our church” or “that’s our pub” and make them real places. There’s a pub called the “Hooray Henry” which is really The Castle near Baker Street, so I went and drew the outside of that.

The Cartoon Museum - History of Cartoons & Comics History of Cartoons & Comics Illustrated lecture on The History of British Cartoons and Caricatures given by Lord Baker of Dorking, trustee of the Cartoon Museum, at Gresham College in London in 2011 can be seen at: You can learn more about Gresham College at Characters and Caricatures, 1700 - 1770 The cartoon art form began with 'caricatura'. A caricature - from the Italian caricare, to load or exaggerate - is a drawing that gives weight to the most striking features of its subject for comic effect. The great Italian masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Annibale Carracci and Gian Lorenzo Benini, all drew caricatures. These were technical exercises in virtuosity with the aim of defining the essence of a person in a few deft strokes of the pen. Many English artists looked to Italy for inspiration, but one man did not. William Hogarth, painter and engraver, believed: "Everything requisite to compleat the consummate painter or sculptor may [be had] with the utmost ease without going out of London".

Hogarth created a new form of picture-story, 'comic history-painting' full of 'characters', not 'caricatura', copies of nature, not exaggerations. His 'modern moral subjects', that can be seen in The Harlot's Progress and The Rake's Progress, depict critical moments in life, in act and consequence. Time is represented in space, between and within each scene. It is for this reason that Hogarth is widely regarded as the father of British caricature, in spite of himself, and of the comic strip. 'The Golden Age', 1770 - 1830 From the 1770s it was the gentleman amateur and semi-amateur, such as Townshend, Bunbury, Woodward and Nixon, who transformed the artform, introducing a more playful style and a strong element of personal caricature. Social satire blossomed, offering humorous observations on current fashions and social pretensions. In the 1780s political satire ripened. Print-shops flourished in the City, Westminster and St. James's, many holding caricature exhibitions.

The hand-coloured copper-plate etching, freer in style that the engraving, became fashionable: often priced at 2 shillings (10p) or more it was a luxury item, and beyond the means of most. The French Revolution in 1789 ignited a fusillade of satirical propaganda in France and Britain. Both 'Loyalist' members of the Pitt coalition and the opposition 'Reform' Whigs around Fox sponsored partisan political prints. At first, the Foxites took the upper hand, creating a new type of sophisticated visual and verbal satire. But news from France of the excesses of the Terror damaged the reform cause. By 1795 the Foxites were in decline, and a blast of repressive measures, culminating in the Treason and Sedition Acts, subdued not only the press and opposition, but also the print publishers. In August 1819, the local Yeoman Cavalry attacked a crowd of peaceful protestors in St Peter's Fields, Manchester. The government response was the repressive Six Acts, including an increase in stamp duty that tripled the price of many papers.

The publisher William Hone and George Cruikshank, the foremost caricaturist of the Regency, answered these attacks on Reform with a little 24-page shilling (5p) pamphlet, The Political House That Jack Built. It would go through 50 editions and sell 100,000 copies. Hone had revived the technique of wood-engraving. The hardwood relief block was more durable that the copper-plate, and could be set with the metal type and printed together, thereby cutting costs. Image and text could now support each other, and reach a wider audience. The Illustrated Magazine 1830 - 1914 The Reform Bill crisis of 1830-2 stirred up a flurry of satirical prints, but topical satire was finding a new home. Following an example in Paris, a number of humorous magazine were launched in Britain. In 1841 the journalist Henry Mayhew and the printer-engraver, Ebenezer Landells founded the most famous of them all: Punch. It was to be a weekly comic paper 'without grossness, partisanship, profanity, indelicacy, or malice'.

In its long life it cultivated the talents of more comic artists than any other British magazine. Vanity Fair was founded in 1868 and revived the tradition of the single-figure caricature in genial colour portraits of celebrities and professional men, a style perfected in this country by Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape'). In the 1880s printers began to use the new photochemical process. A truer facsimile of the artist's work, its tone, texture and detail, was now possible. The greater fidelity benefited two great innovators, Max Beerbohm and Phil May. Modern Times 1914 - 1961 In the First World War, cartoonists rallied to the patriotic cause portraying an encounter between the national symbols and personifications. The morale-boosting works of Bert Thomas and Bruce Bairnsfather proved popular with British troops at the front. The first half of the twentieth century saw the heydey of the popular magazine, and cartoons helped to determine its graphic style and character. William Heath Robinson joined The Sketch in 1906 and entertained its readers through two world wars. H.M.

Bateman perfected the wordless strip cartoon, and his 'The Man Who...' series of colour cartoons filled the centre-spread of The Tatler in the 1920s and 1930s. Victor Weisz, 'Vicky', one of Britain's best post-war political cartoonists, was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1935. When he started at the News Chronicle in 1939 his editor advised a crash course in British culture: he soon had a witty command of a British cartoonist's stock references and motifs, including Shakespeare and Tenniel's Alice drawings. Ronald Searle has been described as 'arguably the foremost graphic artist of [the twentieth] century', and is unquestionably one of the most influential. The malevolent schoolgirls of Searle's 'St Trinian's' appealed to a new public taste for black, cynical humour cultivated in wartime. In his later work a baroque extravagance of detail is painstakingly built up with his extraordinary line - stuttering, fidgety, barbed. The New Satire 1961 - Britain was finally coming out of a post-war period dominated by deference and social conformity.

A younger generation of comedians was appearing on stage, radio and television. In 1961 a new satirical magazine Private Eye was founded. It was a magazine of political gossip and disclosure that ripped aside the curtains of gentility and decorum that Punch had upheld for over a century. For cartoonists it was a breath of fresh air, publishing cartoons that no other newspaper would print. For the first time in many decades caricature took centre stage. Two revolutionary artists pushed British satire to the extreme, both visually and politically: Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe. Wally Fawkes, 'Trog', brought intense focus to caricature and political cartooning through his ability to condense a complex situation into a single memorable image. Peter Fluck and Roger Law had worked together since the 1960s. In the 1970s they began producing three-dimensional caricatures for the [Sunday] Times and other publications. Out of this work grew the satirical show Spitting Image, first screened in Britain in 1983, featuring Fluck and Law's latex puppets.

The British Comic: 1884 - In the mid-1800s the illustrated magazine took many forms, ranging from the respectable and staid Punch to the more lurid 'penny dreadfuls', which entertained the lower orders with tales of crime and horror. Fearful of the effects this might have on impressionable young adults, more wholesome offerings were launched such as the Boy's Own Paper (1879), filled with stirring tales of sporting prowess and imperial adventure. In 1884 Ally Sloper's Half Holiday pioneered the first proto-comic strips. The magazine was the first to mix strips with prose stories and joke cartoons with the Micawberish 'Ally Sloper' appearing in satirical takes on current events. The real break came in 1890 when Alfred Harmsworth launched Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips, the first halfpenny comic papers. They were a runaway success. In 1896 Tom Browne created a pair of tramps who came to be known as Weary Willie and Tired Tim. They held sway on the cover of 'Chips' until it folded in 1953.

In the years leading up to the First World War a host of new titles appeared including Puck, Merry and Bright and Funny Wonder. So great was the demand for comic material that many British comic publishers relied on American reprints. Competition was intense and publishers introduced colour in titles such as Rainbow, which introduced the 'Bruin Boys' led by Tiger Tim, who graduated to his own title in 1919. The cinema inspired several comics including Film Fun and Kinema Comic (1920) featuring real comedians such as Laurel and Hardy. As with most newspaper cartoon strips the story was moved forward by several lines of text that ran below the pictures: the speech bubbles playing a relatively minor role. Paper shortages during the war hit many comics hard. In the 1920s industry revived: the Scottish publisher DC Thomson began to publish a number of new adventure papers. The Wizard (1927), The Rover (1929), and The Hotspur (1937) were essentially illustrated magazines. However in the late 1930s DC Thomson broke the mould when it launched the innovative The Dandy (1937) and The Beano (1938).

These titles offered their readers powerful gag humour with authority-hating characters such as the cow pie devouring Desperate Dan. In the 1950s the influence of American culture extended into the world of comics and many were imported into the UK. Some Christian groups in Britain were concerned at what they felt to be the pernicious influence of American horror comics. They responded with the groundbreaking Eagle. The quality of the artwork, which included Frank Hampson's science-fiction hero Dan Dare, raised the bar for British comics. Hulton Press followed up with Girl (1951) and Robin and Swift for younger children. DC Thomson responded with a new generation of anarchic characters including Davey Law's Dennis the Menace (1951) and Leo Baxendale's Little Plum, Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids (1953/4). In the 1950s and 60s new titles for boys offered sport, war and adventure in Lion, Valiant, and Hurricane. Bunty and Judy gave girls ballet and school stories, and for slightly older girls there was romance in Marilyn, Valentine and Jackie.

In the 1970s, the twin influences of American Underground Comics and Punk shook the industry. Viz (1979) revelled in bad taste but earned a huge following and became the best-selling British comic ever. A number of short-lived titles of the early 1970s introduced artists who were to become major names through 2000AD (1977). These included Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon, Kevin O'Neill and Bryan Talbot, many of whom would later work for major American publishers DC and Marvel Comics. 2000AD also produced Britain's first major comic superhero, Judge Dredd. In the 1980s the Japanese animated series Transformers began to appear on British TV screens while Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball and films such as Akira introduced a British audience to a very different tradition of comic art. In recent years manga, anime and computer games have had a visible affect on the work of younger artists. The Cartoon Strip and the Graphic Novel W.K. Haselden is regarded as the father of the British newspaper cartoon strip.

From 1904 he began to produce 'reflections' on topical subjects in a panel divided into a series of up to eight frames. During the First World War he effectively lampooned the German Kaiser and Crown Prince in his series Big and Little Willie. In 1915 the Daily Mail asked well-known children's illustrator Charles Folkard to create a daily feature for their children's corner. Teddy Tail proved so popular with younger readers that within a few years most of the popular papers were running strips: Pip, Squeak and Wilfred was created by A.B. Payne in 1919-20, Rupert by Mary Tourtel in 1920 and Bonzo by George Studdy in 1922. The most popular strips inspired huge followings amongst their young readers. Pip, Squeak and Wilfred appeared on plates, had their own song, and a fan club called the 'Wilfredian League of Gugnuncs'. The first strip aimed at an adult audience was J. Millar Watt's balding everyman Pop (1921). Watt's strips showed a sophisticated understanding of how a narrative could be developed across the time and space of linked panels.

Another adult strip was Norman Pett's Jane (1932). Jane's greatest hour came during the Second World War when every episode saw her lose her clothes one way or another. She was revived in the 1960s and again in the 1980s and 1990s. Domestic strips were among the most popular and enduring. The suburban family saga The Ruggles (1935-57) was followed by the even more popular Gambols (1950), created by the husband and wife team of Barry and Dobs Appleby. The most popular of all domestic strips featured a drinking, gambling, work-shy northerner Andy Capp (1957). Reg Smythe's original single panel evolved into the most popular British strip ever: at its peak it was syndicated in over 1,400 newspapers worldwide. Another popular export was Fred Basset, Alex Graham's 'Hound that's almost Human'. A very different tradition was the masculine adventure and detective story. Square jawed Dick Tracy had appeared in American papers in 1931. Britain's first action hero was Garth created by Steve Dowling towards the end of World War II.

The exploits of the wartime RAF and a fascination with the space race inspired Sydney Jordan to create Jeff Hawke in 1955. Office politics was the setting for Frank Dickens' Bristow (1961) and again in 1987 when Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor created the thrusting merchant-banker Alex. Rufus and his friend Flook started out in 1949 as a strip for children drawn by 'Trog' (Wally Fawkes). However in the 1960s and 70s it became a sophisticated satirical vehicle for writers such as Humphrey Lyttleton and George Melly. For ten years John Kent's beautiful blonde Varoomshka innocently picked her way through political minefields, enraging legions of feminists along the way. In the 1970s and 80s Posy Simmonds' The Webers followed the mid life crises of the liberal middle classes, Steve Bell charted the rise of Thatcherism in his strips Maggie's Farm and later If..., while Tony Husband's Yobs and later Yobettes offered another slant on hitherto uncelebrated sections of British society.

In the same period cartoon strip and comics artists began to develop increasingly complex narratives. In 1977 Bryan Talbot produced what is regarded as the first graphic novel with the fantasy The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. Alan Moore's collaborations with Dave Lloyd on V for Vendetta, Dave Gibbons on Watchmen and later with Kevin O'Neill on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were landmarks within a genre. Others such as Raymond Briggs showed how the medium could range from children's fantasy in The Snowman to a post-nuclear war scenario in Where the Wind Blows. Talbot returned to tackle the sensitive issue of child abuse in the award-winning The Tale of One Bad Rat. There were also graphic novels inspired by works of literature such as Hunt Emerson's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Lady Chatterly's Lover and Posy Simmond's Flaubertian tale 'of adultery and soft furnishings', Gemma Bovary. Learn and talk about Flook (comic strip), 1949 comics debuts, 1984 comics endings, British comic strips, British comics characters 4 References Characters and story[ edit ] The central characters were a young boy called Rufus and his magical animal friend, Flook.

According to the strip 'The Coming of Flook', which forms part of the cartoon book Rufus and Flook v. Moses Maggot, we learn that Flook, who vaguely resembled a furry pig walking on his hind legs, was a creature from the age of the dinosaurs whom Rufus, in a dream, rescued from cavemen and who then came back to waking reality with him. Flook was able to talk (in six languages) and was blessed with a fine sense of irony with which to temper Rufus' innocence and enthusiasm. He was also able to change shape into all manner of objects, though not much was made of this power after the first couple of years of the strip. They inhabited a satirical and socially-perceptive fantasy world not unrelated to contemporary Great Britain , populated by larger-than-life characters, mostly bearing a striking resemblance to leading politicians and celebrities. [1] Many of their adventures starred their principal adversaries, the villainous Moses Maggot and his sidekick the gaolbird Bodger, whose sister – the overweight teenage witch Lucretia Bodger (a play on Lucretia Borgia ), with her cat, Gobstopper – also appeared quite frequently, as did a mad retired colonel .

Scripts[ edit ] Storylines were written by the singer and writer George Melly , the comedian Barry Took , the musician Humphrey Lyttelton and the film critic Barry Norman . In 1953 some were written by Compton Mackenzie . [2] Several book-length episodes and compilations were separately published, and the Daily Mail also marketed a Flook toy. The ironic and bohemian ethos of the strip was notably at variance with the conservatism of the Daily Mail, [1] which finally discontinued it after some 10,000 episodes, reportedly because the editor David English objected to its repeated jabs at the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher [3] (though she is said to have enjoyed it), and the strip's covert criticism of the Mail's championing of the cause of Zola Budd . [2] After it was dropped by the Mail, Flook ran in the Left-leaning Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror in 1984–85, scripted by Keith Waterhouse (ironically, shortly before he himself moved to the Mail). Flook was adopted as a mascot by 831 Squadron , Fleet Air Arm , and the character was painted on the squadron aircraft.

Question: The cartoon character 'Flook' appeared in which national newspaper from 1949 to 1984?
Answer: DAILY MAIL